The term suspension of distrust or a willing distrust of willingness has been defined as a willingness to suspend a person's critical ability and believe in something unreal; the sacrifice of realism and logic for the sake of pleasure. The term was coined in 1817 by the poet and aesthetic philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who suggested that if a writer could instill "human interest and the resemblance of truth" into a fantastic story, the reader would suspend judgments about infertility of narration. The suspension of distrust often applies to works of fiction from the genre of action, comedy, fantasy, and horror. Cognitive estrangement in fiction involves the use of one's ignorance to promote suspension of mistrust.
The phrase "suspension of unbelief" is used more loosely in the 20th century, often used to imply that the burden is on the reader, not the author, to achieve it. This may be used to refer to the audience's willingness to ignore media limitations, so this does not interfere with the reception of the premises. These places can also provide mind engagement and perhaps propositions of thought, ideas, art and theory.
The suspension of mistrust is often an essential element for magic or sideshow circus acts. For example, the audience is not expected to actually believe that a woman is cut into half or turned into a gorilla to enjoy the show.
According to the theory, the suspension of unbelief is an essential element for any kind of story. With any movie, viewers must ignore the fact that they see the show being staged and temporarily accept it as their reality to be entertained. The black and white films provide clear, early examples that the audience is willing to suspend mistrust, no matter how unreasonable they appear, for the sake of entertainment. With the exception of the total blind people (achromats), nobody has seen these films see the real world without color, but some are still willing to suspend mistrust and accept images to be entertained. The suspension of mistrust should also be important to enjoy many movies and television shows involving complex actions, special effects, and seemingly unrealistic plot and characterization.
Video Suspension of disbelief
The original Coleridge formulation
Coleridge invented the phrase in his book
Coleridge recalled:
... It is agreed that my efforts should be directed towards supernatural persons and characters, or at least romantic, but to transfer from our inner realms into human interest and the sufficient resemblance of truth to get a shadow of the imagination of the unbelieving suspension for the moment, which is a poetic belief. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand is to propose himself as his object, to give a novel charm to things every day, and to evoke analogous feelings with the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from indolent lethargy, and directing it to the beauty and wonder of the world ahead of us...
The idea of ââsuch actions by audiences is somehow acknowledged in antiquity, as seen primarily in the theoretical concern of Roman Horace, who also lived in an age of increasing supernatural skepticism, in his book Arsetika. Ars Poetica (with quote Ut pictura poesis ).
Maps Suspension of disbelief
Example in literature
The suspension of mistrust is sometimes said to be an essential component of live theater, where it is acknowledged by Shakespeare, which refers to it in the Prologue to Henry V :
[...] making an imaginary racial [...] 'is your mind which now must make our kings [...] change the attainment of many years into an hourglass.
Psychology
The psychological criticism of Norman Holland points to the explanation of neuroscience. When we hear or watch any narrative, our brains are completely into a mode of sensing, shutting down the system for action or planning action, and with them going to our system to assess reality. We have, in Coleridge's more accurate second phrase, "poetic faith". That is why humans have trouble recognizing lies: they first believe, then have to make a conscious effort not to believe.
Only when we stop understanding to think about what we have seen or heard, and then we assess the value of truth. If we really "become" fiction - "transported", in psychologist terms - we, as Immanuel Kant points out first, "are not interested". We respond aesthetically, aimlessly. We do not judge the truth of what we feel, even if we stop being transported and think about it, we know it's fiction.
The suspension of distrust has also been used in the context of mental health by Frank DeFulgentis in his book Flux . This is an attempt to illustrate the phenomenon of forgetting the irrational thinking associated with the OCD case. In this book, the author suggests 'suspending unbelief' as opposed to forcing oneself to forget; similar to how someone would put the virus in quarantine. Thus we can allow ourselves to be absorbed in the activities around us until this irrationality disappears by itself.
Criticism
Aesthetic philosophers generally reject the claim that the suspension of distrust accurately marks the relationship between people and "fiction". Kendall Walton notes that, if viewers really suspend mistrust of a horror movie and accept the image as an absolute fact, they will have a series of reactions that really live. For example, the audience will shout, "Look behind you!" to a threatened on-screen character or contact the police when they witness a murder on screen.
However, many of these critics fail to see that Coleridge's original statement came in a limiting clause. The formulation "... that suspension of mistrust for a moment which is a poetic belief," of the necessity implies that there are different types of suspension of unbelief and establishes that poetic beliefs are one example of a larger class. One should not choose to believe that the character in a horror movie is a real person in order, for example, to choose to believe that the character is seeing the buildings seen in the following reverse-shot.
Not all writers believe that the mistrust of distrust adequately marks the relationship of the audience with imaginative art. J. R. R. Tolkien challenged this concept in his essay "On Fairy-Stories", instead choosing a paradigm of secondary belief based on consistency in reality. Tolkien says that, in order for the narrative to function, the reader must believe that what he is reading is true in the secondary realities of the fictional world. By focusing on creating an internally consistent fiction world, writers make secondary confidence possible. Tolkien argues that the suspension of unbelief is only necessary when work has failed to create a secondary trust. From then on the spell is broken, and the reader stops drowning in the story and has to make a conscious effort to suspend mistrust or surrender completely.
See also
- 555 (phone number)
- Violent aestisation
- Compartmentalization (psychology)
- Deus ex machina
- dramatic convention
- The fourth wall
- Fictional paradox
- Soap opera effect
- Suspension rating
- The Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis
- Verisimilitude (literature)
References
External links
- Coleridge's
, Chapter XIV, contains the term
Source of the article : Wikipedia